This Rihanna-Approved Musician Is Changing the Sound of Pop—And Its Impossible Beauty Standards

The British producer Sophie has long been a master manipulator of sound. Her high-pitched vocals; sped-up, synth-heavy beats; and strange noises—bubbles, metal scratching, rubber stretching, all of which she makes herself—transcend genres, from pop to hip-hop to underground electronic music. “The best pop music is when you hit the sweet spot: a bodily sound, a visceral feeling, with a message that you can relate to,” says the songstress over the phone from her New York City hotel room, her voice a whisper. “It gives you a new sensation and a new perspective.” It’s why many claim her hi-tech sound is unlike any other out there, provoking a certain immediacy from her listeners—not to mention her high-profile collaborators, which include Rihanna, Madonna, and J-pop sensation Kyary Pamyu Pamyu.

Sophie has long been a master manipulator of image too—in that, for years, she’s preferred to forgo putting one out there altogether, obscuring her face in photos and masking her voice in interviews. Until now.

Earlier this year, the Glasgow-born musician finally stepped out from behind the curtain, walking the runway at New York Fashion Week for Eckhaus Latta’s Fall 2018 show, and in her new video for “Faceshopping,” the third single off her forthcoming full-length album. In between electro trap beats, bangers that belong in the club, a computer-generated visual of the red-headed singer’s smooth face and big cherry pout is distorted to balloon-like effect. All the while, subliminal messages flash on the screen—a vanity full of high-end beauty products, phrases such as “artificial bloom” and “plastic surgery” and “hydroponic skin”—visualizing the dizzying wordplay at large: “My face is the front of shop/ My face is the real shop front/ My shop is the face I front/ I’m real when I shop my face,” she sings.

“It’s about the emphasized idea that if you’re showing more face, you’re somehow being more real,” she says, recalling her long-lived anonymity in a hyper-exposed industry. “But of course, there is a flip side to that, where you have false identities or different projections of yourself that you’re able to cultivate through your image. The contradictions inherent in that, and of course the idea of plastic surgery and prosthetics, is where that point of what’s real and what's ungenuine falls, and I think there is a lot of confusion at the moment around that, particularly in music culture.”

Sophie, who confirmed that she is transgender late last year, says she underwent several physical transformations of her own “as a way to access something that is more authentic than what I inherited or was born with. I noticed feeling more free, representing how I feel inside on the outside.“

A snapshot of that journey can be seen in the music video for her first single, “It’s Okay to Cry,” which was released in the fall on Instagram (her first post on the platform). In the electronic ballad, the songwriter uses her own voice and shows her face for the very first time in her work, laying down lyrics such as “I know it scares you” and “I accept you” within the song’s first 25 seconds.

And while in the video she appears bare-chested with minimal makeup, save for a glossy pink lip and a hint of blush, in her live performances, she’s heavily inspired by her friends and collaborators, as well as labels such as Helmut Lang, John Galliano, “the Dior couture shows in the early 2000s,” and Maison Margiela. She even sported the latter fashion house’s Spring 2018 runway look—a bright pink swim cap and glossy fuchsia lips—in a live performance of “Faceshopping” in Brooklyn earlier this year. As for her everyday beauty look? People assume she got her fire-red hair from her mother and grandmother, both of whom don the same unique hue, but the truth is, Sophie says, “all the women in my family have been artificially creating the same hair color all our lives.” More proof that authenticity of self is simply what you make of it.